MARX TO ENGELS” 

{London,}] 19 December 1860 

Dear Frederick, 

Tuanks for the £2. I have sent Lenchen to the posr orrick to 
collect it. 

My wife, or so Allen thinks, will not have any pock marks. She 
is, of course, still very indisposed (and it’s precisely when they’re 
recovering that sick people grow more restive and impatient), but 
Allen is perfectly satisfied with her procress. 

4 K. Marx, Herr Vogt. - b See this volume, p. 228.-© K. Marx, The Eighteenth 
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 

As for myself, I am today (the worst thing was lack of sleep) 
much the better for having slept soundly all night and hope to be 
ALRIGHT again in 2, or, at the most, 3, days’ .time. 

Having been too unwell to go out this week, I don’t know how 
the book* has been selling in London. Though I’ve been told by 
Liebknecht that the London Workers’ Society” has bought 6 copies 
for its library this week. 

Zimmermann of Spandau (now a lawyer in London), formerly a 
member of parliament, bosom friend of Vogt, once a great 
traducer of the Volk and of my own person, last week gave a 
dinner at which the lawyer Héchster (connu? from Elberfeld, now 
a very busy avocat in Paris) was present; our friend Rheinlander 
also attended. Zimmermann declared that Blind was hopelessly 
compromised. As ro Vogt, he [Zimmermann] had been reluctant to 
credit bribery, although aware of the chap’s vanity and frivolity. 
But now my work had convinced him that Vogt was nothing but 
an ordinary ‘mouchard” only distinguished from muchardus vulgar- 
is’ by the size of his salary, etc. Moreover, he (Z.) had written to 
acquaintances in Switzerland in order to leave Mr Vogt in no 
doubt about his views. 

Bucher has written and told Borkheim that the case against 
Vogt has been fully proved. Also that my work had eradicated any 
‘prejudice he might have had against Marx’s agitational activities’. 
He had, he wrote, expressed his views on these two points in the 
Camberwell businessmen’s circle (to which he gives lectures on 
the history of German jurisprudence) and written ditto to 
‘influential persons in Germany’. 

Zimmermann and Bucher are of importance here because of the 
philistines. 

In the course of my ordeal—during the past 4 weeks—I have 
read all manner of things. Inter alia Darwin’s book on Natural 
Selection! Although developed in the crude English fashion, this is 
the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis 
for our views. By comparison, A. Bastian’s Der Mensch in der 
Geschichte (3 stout volumes; the chap’s a young Bremen doctor 
who has spent several years travelling round the world), with its 
attempt to present psychology in terms of ‘natural science’ and 
history in terms of psychology, is bad, muddled, and amorphous. 

a K. Marx, Herr Vogt. - > known - © police spy - ¢ common police spy - © district in 
London - f Ch. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the 
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London, 1859. 

The only useful thing in it is a few ethnographical opprries now 
and again. And, what is more, very pretentious and atrociously 
written. 

Apropos. As regards Ludwig Simon, try and guess how I 
succeeded in catching out the gentle Kunigunde.* 

Lassalle, from whom I got a letter a few weeks ago, is very ill. 
Not gout—osteitis? Is publishing, or so he writes, ‘a long and 
important work’ with Brockhaus in 2 volumes,” 17 hours in bed, 3 
hours up, and busy proof-correcting this ‘long and important 
work’. I can hardly suppose the anti-Vogt piece, which I sent him, 
will serve to alleviate his aches and pains. But whose fault is it that 
he’s a Berlin ‘idealist politician’? 

Have I already written and told you‘ what a ‘crassly material 
basis’ there is to the intimacy between Freiligrath and student 
Blind “? 

Salut. 

Your 
K. M.